Bible Stories Retold
Stories from Holy Writ. By Helen Waddell. (Constable. 8s. 6d.) DR. WADDELL is richly endowed with the gift, rarely conferred on historians of her great erudition and distinction, of communicating her delight in ancient narratives to the minds and hearts of young children. Her eminence as a student of mediaeval history has been recognised on the exalted levels proper to such recognition, but for every one of her admirers in the academic grove there must be many who will always remember her with happiness for tales which they heard on a summer day with their faces so close to the grass that there could be no difficulty in seeing the bulrushes around Moses' cradle and the glistening beehive becoming Pharaoh's palace.
The art by which Dr. Waddell has made the Middle Ages vivid for thousands of readers, to whom otherwise they would have remained dark indeed, is employed in this enchanting volume in re- telling stories from the Bible. Her versions were written thirty years and more ago, and have remained unpublished in book-form be- cause, says the author, "I grew impatient of any tampering with the grandeur of the Authorised version." But the small children for whom the stories were written are now themselves the older genera- tion, and insist that their children shall have the stories which were read aloud to them. "One grows old and indulgent, even to the prose of one's youth," says Dr. Waddell. But no indulgence is needed, for as these tales are told again, with that wealth of incident and curious detail which children crave, they exist, as it were, by their own right in their new dress. Dr. Waddell here, as in all her very popular books, eschews archaisms like the plague, and the result is lively and memorable prose setting forth the great stories of the Old and New Testaments in the idiom of the day, which, if not the "timeless English" of Mgr. Ronald Knox's aspiration, will make its lively impact of authenticity for a good many years to
come. C. B. MORTLOCK.
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